Intrepid golfers try to revive a course destroyed in the Indonesian tsunami

They've hewn a makeshift pitch-and-putt out of the detritus near Banda Aceh to affirm a former way of life not yet buried.

By Oakley Brooks | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

from the December 26, 2007 edition

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mon ikuen, INDONESIA - On the coastal plain here where the 2004 tsunami arrived 30 feet tall, I recently saw knots of roving men pausing to hit golf shots. The scrubby area had been colonized by enough flowering weeds that it was impossible to see what the guys were aiming at, so I followed them and found their tiny, weed-whacked greens, complete with holes lined in plastic tarp and flags on coat-hanger wire.

Scattered on the ground were bits of concrete, tile floor, sea shells, an oven-sized ball of coral, an office shingle with two doctors' names on it. I pored over the detritus, still here these three years later. The players weren't interested. They handed me a few clubs, quality irons with graphite shafts, and asked me to join. They walked to their balls at a march. I asked them what they were doing at the moment the waves hit. They asked me what my handicap was. They swung in smooth, grooved arcs. They even anted up 50,000 Indonesian rupiah apiece (about $5) for each round's winner. "Please...," Jamil, a tall, quiet man, kept saying to me gently, pointing to my ball and encouraging me to step up and play. They were engrossed, playing for pocket money.

But I learned it was for much more than that. Once a full-length, nine-hole course sat here, with fine Manila grass greens and native pines lining the fairways. A clubhouse looked out over the sand dunes to the ocean. An enveloping wall kept the cows and goats out. These men were part of a staff of more than 200 caddies, teachers, and greenskeepers who catered to members and visitors – Aceh's wealthiest businessmen and government brass. Seulawah Padang Golf, named after volcanic peaks nearby, was the only course around. The workers want it back.

For that cause, a dozen of them daily stalk the makeshift pitch-and-putt they've hewn from the tsunami wasteland, hoping somebody with the means to rebuild will show up. They play to keep vigil for a former way of life not yet buried. "We want to show people there was a course here, because we live here, this is our land, and we still think there's something that can happen here," says Jumarlin, a former greenskeeper.

Three years have passed since the tsunami and the golfers, like their neighbors, have refashioned huge chunks of their lives. They've learned to let things go: their wives, their children, their friends, their old pictures of the course – all lost in the tsunami that claimed 169,000 Achenese. They accommodate the new – spouses and babies, odd jobs to stay flush, thousands of foreigners who've helped deliver fresh-built schools, boxy cement houses, mosques, and roads in the massive $8 billion recovery effort.

Seulawah Padang Golf remains in limbo. Its former importance in the district of Lhok Nga, 10 miles south of the capital of Banda Aceh, is no secret to the big players in Aceh's reconstruction. "It was a major source of livelihoods," says Simon Field, head of the UN Development Program (UNDP) in Aceh, which this summer found a way to pay the golf crew to clean up part of the former driving range.

But for the UNDP or any aid group to do more would mean selling the idea that a golf club is part of tsunami recovery. And it would mean winning the blessing of the provincial government, which owns the land but is preoccupied with steering the restless province as it emerges from 30 years of separatist struggle, as well as the tsunami aftermath.

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